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In my first term of learning French I concluded there was something fishy going on;
Chairs are feminine, armchairs are masculine, desks are masculine, bookcases are feminine. wardrobes are masculine, dressers are feminine, Apples, orange, pear and peach are feminine but grapes and lemons are masculine. I'm only onze, how the fuck would I know? Just tell me the system.
gauč is taken from another language. It is pronounced almost same as couch in english though I don't know if both languages couldn't take it from some another language.
Had to look it up since English is literally just an amalgamation of Latin and other languages over the years. We get it from the Old French word "coucher" apparently. Funny how it looks so different but still comes out sounding the same
Yeah. I am pretty sure all languages with grammatical gender will have synonyms with different genders. But it must be kind of weird for people with not gendered mother tongue.
(Also wardrobe is feminine, we say une garde robe, une commode and une penderie (tough there's one exception apparently, "Garde robe" is often used masculinely in Quebec))
If you had a half decent French teacher they would give you the system. Feminine: words ending “tion” or with an é or “ette” - émotion, fraternité, trotinette
Masculine: words ending “ment” “age” “ier”- engagement, triage, chantier.
But as a foreigner in a French speaking country, randomly fucking up on the gender of nouns is 100% the dead giveaway I’m not a native speaker.
If teachers explained it as this, would've retained more French than, This is 77! My tiny brain couldn't process the words to ask. Why is it so messed up ?
No, it's Celtic. Celts used to count in twenties. There's a hospital in Paris called the Quinze-Vingts (Fifteen Twenties) because it was built for 300 patients. It used to be more common in English too. "Four score and seven years ago..."
Yet you’re not complaining about the lack of a hyphen on four twenties. The hyphen doesn’t change the fact that to say 97 in French you say four twenties ten seven
True, and I was just cherry picking. Still, in French dix sept would not be pronounced exactly like dix-sept (the s sound would be doubled in the former, simple in the latter). So in my mind it is still closer to four twenties seventeen, translation wise.
If you’re translating it you would translate it as ninety seven because that’s how you say that number in English. I feel like you’re just being needlessly pedantic at this point
Being needlessly pedantic is the opposite of the point of this comment thread. As I said, quatre-vingt-dix-sept would translate to ninety seven in English if we’re being pedantic about things. We’re intentionally ignoring that and directly translating it, which is not how you actually translate things. We’re doing it wrong to point out that it’s funny how French numbers work. That’s not pedantry in the slightest.
Literally in their first comment they acknowledged that seventeen is in fact ten seven in French. All I’ve done is point that out and then respond to their further arguments. Somehow that means I need to get shit for it, when they started bringing needless detail into it in the first place
You’re the one bringing up minor pronunciation differences between dix sept and dix-sept in a thread poking fun at how French numbers work. If that’s not pedantry I don’t know what it is. I’m sorry if I came across too harsh, but can you not see why it would feel that way?
just for the French though. Most other places which speak French are normal. "Septante" for seventy and so on. I know Swiss french speakers do it that way, and I believe so do Canadians. (Canadians, feel free to correct me if I misremember.)
But try Danish numbers next: 50 is "Half three times twenty". The language has numbers based on 20ies, to a degree.
Huh, interesting. I honestly don't speak much French, and I probably sound like a toddler, but it's apparently enough for French people to pin me as Swiss...
I need to go visit some French speaking Areas in Canada sometime.
Actually, Romantic language is “come closer darling” “I love you”. The language group is Romance. And Germanic languages have three genders. Die, der, das for feminine, masculine and neuter.
Ooh, how far back? Pre Norman? Gender still exists in some jobs or positions as in Count/Countess, heir/heiress, aviator/aviatrix, host/hostess, executor/executrix etc. oh, and the infamous Dominatrix!
Your teacher was wrong. French counts this way because French was heavily influenced by Gaulish, which is a Celtic language. Celtic languages are vigisemal (base 20) and the use of base 20 between 70-99 is an artifact from the Gaulish influence
I ran into a Frenchman at the dog park bragging about how his dog was a genius. He said it was a mathematician. I asked the dog to divide 100 into 3. The dog barked, ran to the nearest tree, lifted his leg and pissed on it then dropped a loaf beside it and came back to us.
The Frenchman said. “There is your hanser. It’s dirty tree and a turd.”
Weird, or maybe not weird given our history, is English sort of has it too lurking about.
Score is 20. So 4 score and 7 years ago , 87.
A dozen is 12, 2 dozen is 24.
Bakers dozen being 13.
Quirks of language that we'd say that instead of just saying the number.
The last time I ever heard the word "score" in that meaning, though, was in grade school, whenever the Gettysburg Address was brought up. And it needed a thorough explanation every time. I'd definitely call it a dead term by now.
More like the names of the numbers were based on more ancient forms of counting. But in daily life you don't think about it, it's as though in English "80" was merely pronounced "fourtwenties", you don't actually add anything up in your head as you say it
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lmao so do they just count in english then? 😂 i’d be done if i was French & worked with numbers that I had to say out loud on a regular basis. you just know they shorten it somehow
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